Kukla's Korner Hockey

“I don’t want Lady Byng,” Selanne said after Monday night’s game, smiling. Seriously?
“Burkie (General Manager Brian Burke) would probably trade me if I won Lady Byng,” he said, laughing loudly.
I assumed Selanne was joking, too - until calling Burke and repeated my conversation with the Ducks star.
“Teemu’s not very far from the truth,” Burke said bluntly. He wasn’t laughing.
Burke went on to say the Lady Byng is the only NHL postseason award he “won’t give a bonus for” when negotiating incentive clauses in contracts.
“It’s something I don’t particularly want to see on my team,” he said of the Lady Byng.

The Flyers made club history Tuesday night with their record-setting seventh straight loss, but didn’t play like a team trying to avoid an ignominious place in franchise lore….
“In my opinion, there were young players, veteran players in the second period who didn’t play hard enough,” he said. “We need to dig in for 60 minutes, not just first effort, but second and third. Working is one thing, competing is another. Working is working with a will, and that’s what we need from our team.”

Whoever winds up owning the Pittsburgh Penguins may inherit an unpleasant chore: defending a multi-million-dollar lawsuit from a disgruntled Canadian billionaire.
Investment bankers who specialize in the sports industry say it’s likely that Jim Balsillie, chief executive of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, will sue the Penguins to recoup the reported $10 million (all figures U.S.) deposit he gave the team to look at the team’s finances as he considered making an offer to buy the 39-year-old franchise.

Balsillie walked away and left the team without an owner as the hours slipped away before the state’s all-important decision on the gaming license.
Sources tell ESPN.com that had those same restrictions been in place for other owners who have purchased teams in recent years, those owners would have walked away from the league in a heartbeat….
But the team source said Lemieux might be equally chagrined at the league for pushing away a man whose personal wealth would have allowed him to purchase the team without financing.
“I can’t imagine the current ownership group in Pittsburgh is very happy with Gary,” the source told ESPN.com.
Unless Bettman is already in the process of negotiating a backroom deal with the state and/or city to ensure a palatable Plan B is already in place if Isle of Capri is dealt a losing hand.

Babcock said, “Who sells hockey? To me, I don’t know. I don’t know for sure.”
After mentioning baseball, Babcock jumped to football and said the NFL markets its product well. He said he thought NFL games were much better to watch on television than in person.
“Our game’s just exactly the opposite,” Babcock said. “We gotta do a better job of the guy at home knowing how good the game actually is. How fast-paced, how physical, how great the athletes are, how hard they work.
“To me, we got a way better game than we sell. Somehow, we gotta figure that out and sell it.”

The Pittsburgh Penguins have acquired defenseman Wade Brookbank from the Boston Bruins for future considerations, it was announced Tuesday by general manager Ray Shero.
Brookbank has been assigned to the Penguins’ American Hockey League affiliate in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.

Scoring is down from last season, which has the NHL’s rules guru contemplating a change he never thought he’d consider.
“I know this is going to rock some traditionalists, and I can say this because I’m one of those, but I really think we’ve got to look long and hard at bigger nets,” Colin Campbell, the NHL’s director of hockey operations, said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Just weeks after Alex Ovechkin fired Don Meehan and announced that his parents would be handling his affairs, San Jose Sharks superstar Joe Thornton has left well-known agent J.P. Barry. Thornton’s brother, John, who had previously worked with Barry, is in the process of being certified by the NHL Players’ Association and will represent Thornton.
The firings bring into question whether or not top-end players, most of whom are automatically paid 20 per cent of the team’s salary cap, are finding that they don’t need their agents.

Show me the passion! I’m not suggesting that the NHL bring back goons, the thugs like Broad Street Bully Dave Schultz of the Flyers or Detroit’s Joey Kocur, who could be counted on to mug opponents a couple of times in every game. But there can be no denying the entertainment value of watching genuinely angry men, guys who could play and fight.
Ted Lindsay. Tiger Williams. Bobby Nystrom. Wayne Cashman. Thy kept the bad blood flowing from one game to the next, leading to a delicious sense of anticipation that is utterly lacking in today’s cleaner/faster/safer NHL.

Is this the year of the Original Six revival?
OK, it may be too soon to go down that path right now, with mid-season still a couple of weeks away, but the recent turnarounds in Boston and Chicago have all six of the 1967 pre-expansion teams in the playoff chase, which is something you couldn’t have said last year, as the Bruins stumbled and the Blackhawks bumbled their way through seriously underachieving seasons.